TIBCO is garbage. They had a halo for a long time from Rendezvous/EMS. But their money maker was this integration suite called BusinessWorks. It was this horrifyingly complex application that forced you into these ruts so that it could compile Java code. I kid you not, the developer environment for complex code was notepad.exe.
They spent a bunch of money on M&A and eventually had to go private and buy out the founder.
IMO, there is no “TIBCO-like approach” to application integration c. 2020 any more than there is say an Oracle or AWS or Google approach to databases. It’s multi-paradigm, multi-usecase and polyglot. TIBCO as a vendor supports approaches and patterns ranging from event-driven functions to data streams and stateful orchestration to stateless mediation to choreography. The “runtimes” are built on anything from Golang, Python & Node to Java, Scala & .NET.
What you‘re referring to sounds like the legacy version of BusinessWorks 5.x that was launched back in 2001. The current generation of BusinessWorks 6.x provides Eclipse-based tooling just like closest alternatives like Talend, Mule, Fuse, etc. and deploys to 18+ PaaSes (k8s, swarm, GKE, AKS, etc.) or its own managed iPaaS aka TIBCO Cloud Integration. It’s aimed at Enterprise Integration specialists at a Global 2000 or F500.
If you‘re an app developer at a large bank/telco/retailer/airline building integration logic or stream processing or event-driven data pipelines, you‘re likely to use Project Flogo (flogo.io) It’s 3-clause BSD FLOSS and has commercial support and optionally commercial extensions available. Oh and you’re likely going to use Flogo apps with Apache Pulsar or Apache Kafka messaging. Both Pulsar and Kafka are available as commercially supported software from TIBCO (Rendezvous or EMS are our traditional proprietary messaging products). Flogo apps can deploy to TIBCO Cloud, dozen+ flavors of k8s, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run or as a binary on an edge device.
(Disclaimer: Product at TIBCO. Used to work on BW 6.0 back when the only PaaS was good ol’ Heroku)
They spent a bunch of money on M&A and eventually had to go private and buy out the founder.